yams and artichokes

it has rained and thoroughly watered the garden the last few days so the maintenance needs have consisted of a minimal amount of weeding...mostly pulling the crabgrass from the university lawn out and aerating the soil around the plants...the jerusalem artichokes have begun to flower in earnest and will cycle through all the buds over the next month or so...the buds are multiplying and i counted well over five hundred today on the fourteen plants...no shortage of big yellow flowers for a while...the second yam has finally reached the top of the trellis post so i put the second one in and strung some mason's twine across for it to spiral around..i also put another line across about mid-point in the trellis posts so the cowpeas will have somewhere to vine besides aruind other plants...the rain has returned the eastern gamagrass to a lush state and the clumps are expanding their territory..by nest year i'm thinking the two clumps at the eastern edge of the garden will have nearly met making a gamagrass border on that side as a counterpoint to the asparagus and intermediate wheat grass beds on the western side...with jerusalem artichokes on the north and the other asparagus on the south that will leave only the middle open of new plants...i have requested germplasm for wild potatoes from the international potato institute and dr. david tay tells me that he will happily send it...just waiting for the bureaucracy to process things...wild potatoes are perennials and they are not plant/replant like domestic potatoes so once they go in they will be another permanent denizen along with the asparagus and chinese yams...i will grow potatoes next year on campus as a morphological comparison of ancestor/domesticate much like the teosinte/gamagrass/ maize grouping and intermediate wheat grass/ wheat that was grown this year..the one hundred and sixty square feet are filling up....within another season or two ( providing the university tolerates it) it will be on its way to permaculture with only a ground cover left to be selected ( new zealand or okinawa spinach?)...then the perennial garden project will be living up to its name and the morphological stuff will be confined to my back yard ( wild potatoes will grow here as well)